As I sat with a client yesterday I could see that her relationship, her way of talking, interacting with her emotional self, was so awful. If it was a picture, it would two women sitting on the couch – one is crying and curled up, and then this mirror person sitting next to her, chastising her for feeling this way, saying that there is no good reason for it, that if you kept going this way you will loose your life, and generally not accepting this essential part of herself. It’s almost like the intellectual self is being abusive to the emotional self.

So I came away from that session feeling very odd and displaced. This woman was experiencing lots of sadness and anger, and frustration too. Her thinking mind was telling her off, expecting too much of herself, and beating herself up for being this way … still … like somehow she should be ‘over it’ (the pain she was experiencing in her life at that time).

I got to thinking that our relationship with our emotional self is often quite harsh. We don’t include it as a valuable and special part of who we are. Or maybe we do if its about pleasant emotions like joy and happiness and love, but when it comes to the so called unpleasant ones it’s like we are saying no way – go away.

Let’s imagine our emotional self sitting next to us, she looks the same as us, but is a little uncomfortable by the range of emotions occurring, and she’s a bit of a stranger to us, and what we might be doing is relating to her in some of these ways:

go away, I don’t like you

you are not supposed to be here

I am going to push you away and ignore you

there is no reason for you to be here

I am afraid of you

if I bring you into my life, I’m afraid of what it might mean

I can’t find any good reason for you to be here

I am only going to like you if you bring me pleasant emotions

If I embrace you then that must mean that I am not coping, or that I’m weak, or that there is something wrong with me

Because I can’t understand you, I need to control you – this is preferable

Or maybe you might use a voice like a parent or spouse does – You are hopeless, overly emotional, too sensitive (critical voice)

So I want to help people change their relationship with their emotional self – to befriend it, to not fear it, to embrace and allow it, to not get caught up in the interpretive judgments of it, to not try to control it or manage it; and to nurture it.

Of course, I am not saying that all emotions need to be expressed and made room for all of our waking moments, as we do need to function in life, but if we were to take one step closer to befriending our emotional self, what would that step be?